SAINT PAUL, Minn., June 7, 2013 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- Primordial today announced the beta release of Ooze, a cloud-hosted platform for extracting and annotating geographic features, such as roads, trails, trees, water, parking lot boundaries, and walls from overhead or street-level imagery. Ooze can also be used to inventory, identify, or measure physical objects found in imagery and video frames such as trees, fire hydrants, light poles, parking meters and road signs. Frequently changing data sets, such as the footprints of buildings, become affordable to create and maintain due to lowered job cost and reduced staffing overhead.

Anyone can post an Ooze job to create custom maps without a substantial investment in GIS expertise, tools or infrastructure. Companies, agencies and municipalities can leverage a large, crowd-sourced community so that they can scale their workforce on-demand and complete jobs that might otherwise be cost-prohibitive.

Ooze enforces strict quality control procedures to ensure high quality results. Each task is reviewed one or more times for accuracy and completeness. "Quality is an important part of the Ooze workflow," says Randy Milbert, President of Primordial. "We've developed methods for measuring the level of quality for both the reviewing tasks as well as the drawing tasks to ensure high-quality results."

Workers are paid only when drawing or attributing tasks are accepted by reviewers. For quality review tasks, reviewers are tested with random samples of intentionally defaced tiles which they must reject. Workers demonstrating consistently poor performance are locked out of the job.

Ooze provides a number of dashboards and reports to visualize job progress in real-time. These tools provide managers with much needed information to track progress and timelines. Because Ooze organizes jobs into finite tasks, the total job costs are known up front, before the job begins.

Ooze is available as an on-premise solution for private workforces as well. Organizations dealing with sensitive or confidential material can leverage the Ooze workflow on internal networks to enlist the help of employees beyond the GIS department. Ooze takes the complexity out of digitizing, attributing and identifying geographic features. There is no need for additional GIS tools or training since Ooze presents tasks through a web-based user interface and manages the workflow automatically.

About Primordial

Founded in 2002 and based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Primordial is a leader in off-route planning and terrain analysis software for the United States military and consumer applications. Primordial's flagship product, Ground Guidance®, is patented software that determines the best path through off-road terrain by analyzing vegetation, terrain, threats, and man-made features. Primordial's customers include the United States Army, United States Air Force, United States Marine Corps, DARPA, General Dynamics, Rockwell Collins, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. For more information, please visit http://primordial.com.